Everglades 26.-27.12.2012 We spent two superb days exploring the Everglades national park area. Our hostel, Everglades International Hostel, provides free breakfast in form of ingredients to make your own pancakes on an outdoors stove, so that's how we started our mornings: Leo making the best pancakes of the hostel (a comment he received from a co-resident, and I cannot disagree either ;-). On day one we drove our car to Shark Valley visitor center planning to rent bikes to take the 24 kilometer bike ride around the wetlands. We arrived at the entrance to find out that firstly, the parking lot was full, and second, there was a waiting list to rent bikes. Neither issue proved too serious, though, we managed to park the car a bit outside of the park, and landed bikes after some ... read more

It's day before Christmas eve; 8 o'clock in the morning. I (Johanna) have been awake already for more than an hour, even though we didn't go to bed until 2AM last night. I thought I had started to get over my jet lag as yesterday I managed to sleep until 7.30 (having woken up well before 6 on the first two mornings), but apparently that is not the case. Leo of course is fully accustomed to the time zone since he has been in US for more than a month now. We have been in Miami now for three days. We are staying at South Beach, Washington Avenue. The first two days Leo was still working remotely, so I was looking around the town mostly on my own during the days. I ended up spending most ... read more

Minsk was something like a bonus destination on our trip, since we didn't originally plan to go there, but it is on our route home, and makes a good one day stopover on our way from Kiev to Vilnius. 12th city of the trip in total. We arrived by night train at 8.30, again tired and feeling worn after the night on the train. We can sleep ok on trains, but whenever the train journey includes a border crossing we are woken up in the middle of the night by several people checking our passports, asking about our luggage etc. This takes time, so we end up being awake something like an hour in the middle of the night. Also the fact that there are no shower possibilities etc..well, let's just say a night on the ... read more

16.7.2012 Kiev We had an early wake up at 7.30 and even though we hadn't stayed up particularly late the night before, we were kind of tired all day. But, we had to get our bureaucratic stuff done, so couldn't stay in bed. We will return home by train, bus and boat, and the quickest route goes via Belarus. To go to Belarus we need a transit visa, which gives us permission to stay for 48 hours. So, first thing in the morning (after a heavy breakfast consisting of sausages, fried potato pancakes, fried mushrooms and coffee) we headed to the Belarus Embassy via photo shop to get passport pictures done. When we arrived at the embassy, we were first directed to some slightly shady office on the other side of the street, where a man ... read more

Our train arrived in Kiev at around 7 o'clock in the morning. We didn't have a room booked and didn't really feel like staying in at someone's apartment again, so we took the subway from railway station to the center to find breakfast and wifi to find a hostel. We managed to book a room at DownTown Hostel and walked there with our backpacks. Luckily the room was immediately available so we could get settled and freshen up a bit. Since we were tired after the night on the train we didn't want to do any heavy sightseeing, but decided to do a walking tour which was descibed in our guidebook. It was supposed to last about two hours but for us it was more like six. We took a few breaks, but we were quite ... read more